The structural virality of online diffusion

Transcription

1 The structural virality of online diffusion Sharad Goel, Ashton Anderson Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, U.S.A Jake Hofman, Duncan J. Watts Microsoft Research, New York, NY, 10016, U.S.A. Viral products and ideas are intuitively understood to grow through a person-to-person diffusion process analogous to the spread of an infectious disease; however, until recently it has been prohibitively difficult to directly observe purportedly viral events, and thus to rigorously quantify or characterize their structural properties. Here we propose a formal measure of what we label structural virality that interpolates between two conceptual extremes: content that gains its popularity through a single, large broadcast, and that which grows through multiple generations with any one individual directly responsible for only a fraction of the total adoption. We use this notion of structural virality to analyze a unique dataset of a billion diffusion events on Twitter, including the propagation of news stories, videos, images, and petitions. We find that across all domains and all sizes of events, online diffusion is characterized by surprising structural diversity. Popular events, that is, regularly grow via both broadcast and viral mechanisms, as well as essentially all conceivable combinations of the two. Correspondingly, we find that the correlation between the size of an event and its structural virality is surprisingly low, meaning that knowing how popular a piece of content is tells one little about how it spread. Finally, we attempt to replicate these findings with a model of contagion characterized by a low infection rate spreading on a scale-free network. We find that while several of our empirical findings are consistent with such a model, it does not replicate the observed diversity of structural virality. Key words : Twitter, diffusion, viral media 1. Introduction When a piece of online media content say a video, an image, or a news article is said to have gone viral, it is generally understood not only to have rapidly become popular, but also to have attained its popularity through some process of person-to-person contagion, analogous to the spread of a biological virus (Anderson and May 1991). In many theoretical models of adoption (Coleman et al. 1957, Bass 1969, Mahajan and Peterson 1985, Valente 1995, Bass 2004, Toole et al. 2012), in fact, this analogy is made explicit: an infectious agent whether an idea, a product, or a behavior is assumed to spread from infectives (those who have it) to susceptibles (those who 1

2 2 Goel et al.: The structural virality of online diffusion Figure 1 A schematic depiction of broadcast versus viral diffusion, where nodes represent individual adoptions and edges indicate who adopted from whom. do not) via some contact process, where susceptibles can then be infected with some probability. 1 Both intuitively and also in formal theoretical models, therefore, the notion of viral spreading implies a rapid, large-scale increase in adoption that is driven largely, if not exclusively, by peerto-peer spreading. Clearly, however, viral spreading is not the only mechanism by which a piece of content can spread to reach a large population. In particular, mass media or marketing efforts rely on what might be termed a broadcast mechanism, meaning simply that a large number of individuals can receive the information directly from the same source. As with viral events, broadcasts can be extremely large the Superbowl attracts over 100 million viewers, while the front page of the most popular news websites attract a similar number of daily visitors hence the mere observation that something is popular, or even that it became so rapidly, is not sufficient to establish that it spread in a manner that resembles social contagion. Fig. 1 schematically illustrates these two stylized modes of distribution broadcast and viral where the former is dominated by a large burst of adoptions from a single parent node, and the latter comprises a multi-generational branching process in which any one node directly infects only a few others. Although the stylized patterns in Fig. 1 are intuitively plausible and also easily distinguishable from one another, differentiating systematically between broadcast and viral diffusion requires one in effect to characterize the fine-grained structure of viral diffusion events. Yet in spite of a large theoretical and empirical literature on the diffusion of information and products, relatively little is known about their structural properties, in part because the requisite data have not been available until very recently, and in part because the concept of virality itself has not been previously formulated in an explicitly structural manner. Classical diffusion studies (Coleman et al. 1957, Rogers 1962, Bass 1969, Valente 1995, Young 2009, Iyengar et al. 2010), for example, typically had access to only aggregate diffusion data, such as the cumulative number of adoptions of a product, technology, or idea over time (Fichman 1992). 1 Even models of social contagion that do not correspond precisely to the mechanics of biological infectious disease (for example, threshold models (Granovetter 1978) make different assumptions regarding the non-independence of sequential contacts with infectives (Lopez-Pintado and Watts 2008)) assume some form of person-to-person spread (Watts 2002, Kempe et al. 2003, Dodds and Watts 2004).

3 Goel et al.: The structural virality of online diffusion 3 In such cases, the observation of an S-shaped adoption curve indicating a period of rapid growth followed by saturation is typically interpreted as evidence of social contagion (Rogers 1962); however, S-shaped adoption curves may also arise from broadcast distribution mechanisms such as marketing or mass media (Van den Bulte and Lilien 2001). Compounding the difficulty, real diffusion events are unlikely to conform precisely to either of these conceptual extremes. In a highly heterogeneous media environment (Walther et al. 2010, Wu et al. 2011), where any given piece of content can spread via , blogs, and social networking sites as well as via more traditional offline media channels, one would expect that popular content might have benefited from some possibly complicated combination of broadcasts and interpersonal spreading. To understand the underlying structure of an event, therefore, one must reconstruct the full adoption cascade, which in turn requires observing both individual-level adoption decisions and also the social ties over which these adoptions spread. Only recently have data satisfying these requirements become available, as a result of online behavior such as blogging (Adar and Adamic 2005, Yang and Leskovec 2010), e-commerce (Leskovec et al. 2006), multiplayer gaming (Bakshy et al. 2009), and social networking (Sun et al. 2009, Yang and Counts 2010, Bakshy et al. 2011, Petrovic et al. 2011, Goel et al. 2012, Hoang and Lim 2012, Tsur and Rappoport 2012, Kupavskii et al. 2012, Jenders et al. 2013, Ma et al. 2013). A second empirical challenge in measuring the structure of diffusion events, which has in fact been highlighted by these recent studies, is that the vast majority of cascades over 99% are tiny, and terminate within a single generation (Goel et al. 2012). Large and potentially viral cascades are therefore necessarily very rare events; hence one must observe a correspondingly large number of events in order to find just one popular example, and many times that number to observe many such events. As we will describe later, in fact, even moderately popular events occur in our data at a rate of only about one in a thousand, while viral hits appear at a rate closer to one in a million. Consequently, in order to obtain a representative sample of a few hundred viral hits arguably just large enough to estimate statistical patterns reliably one requires an initial sample on the order of a billion events, an extraordinary data requirement that is difficult to satisfy even with contemporary data sources. In this paper, we make three distinct but related contributions to the understanding of the structure of online diffusion events. First, we introduce a rigorous definition of structural virality that quantifies the intuitive distinction between broadcast and viral diffusion, and allows for interpolation between them. As we explain in more detail below, our definition is couched exclusively in terms of observed patterns of adoptions, not on the details of the underlying generative process. Although this approach may seem counterintuitive in light of our opening motivation (which does make reference to generative models), the benefit is that the resulting measure does not depend on

4 4 Goel et al.: The structural virality of online diffusion any modeling assumptions or unobserved properties, and hence can be applied easily in practice. Also importantly, by treating structural virality as a continuously varying quantity, we skirt any categorical distinctions between completely broadcast and viral events, allowing instead for open-ended and fine-grained distinctions between these two extremes. Events, that is, can be more or less structurally viral without imposing any particular threshold for becoming or going viral. Our second contribution is to apply this measure of structural virality to investigate the diffusion of nearly a billion news stories, videos, pictures and petitions on the microblogging service Twitter. To date, most studies directly documenting person-to-person diffusion have been limited to a small set of highly viral products (Liben-Nowell and Kleinberg 2008, Dow et al. 2013), leaving open the possibility that such hand-selected events are astronomically rare and not representative of viral diffusion more generally. In contrast, by systematically exploring the structural properties of a billion events on Twitter, we aim to estimate the frequency of structurally viral cascades, quantify the diversity in the structure of cascades, and investigate the relationship between cascade size and structure. It could be, for example, that the most popular content is also extremely viral, but equally it could be that successful products are mostly driven by mass media (i.e., a single large broadcast), or by some combination of broadcasts and word-of-mouth. Depending on the relative importance of broadcast vs. viral diffusion in driving popularity, that is, the relationship between popularity and structural virality could be positive (larger events are dominated by viral spreading), negative (larger events are dominated by broadcasts), or neither (all events regardless of size exhibit a similar mix of broadcasts and virality, which scale together). Applying our structural virality measure to a representative sample of successful cascades we find evidence for the third possibility namely that the correlation between popularity and virality is generally low. Moreover, for any given size (equivalent popularity) structural virality is extremely diverse: cascades can range between pure broadcasts, in the sense that all adopters receive the content from the same source, and highly viral in the sense of comprising multigenerational branching structures. The third contribution of this paper is to compare our empirical observations of cascade structure to predictions from a series of simple generative models of diffusion. Specifically, we conduct largescale simulations of a simple disease-like contagion model, similar to the original Bass model of product adoption (Bass 1969) on a network comprising 25 million nodes. In the simplest variant, we assume that the infectiousness of the disease is a constant and the network on which it spreads is an Erdos-Renyi random graph. In successively more complicated variants, we allow the infectiousness to vary, or the network to be scale free (i.e., where the number of neighbors can vary from tens to tens of millions), or both. Because large diffusion events are so rare, we also conduct on the order of one billion simulations per parameter setting, necessitating over 100 billion simulations in total. We find that although our simplest models are incapable of replicating even the

5 Goel et al.: The structural virality of online diffusion 5 most general features of our empirical data, a still-simple model comprising constant infectiousness and scale-free degree distribution can capture many, but not all, of the observed features. We conclude with some suggestions for future modeling efforts. 2. Defining Structural Virality We now turn to our first goal of defining structural virality. Before proceeding, we re-emphasize that our notion of structural virality is intended to complement, not substitute for, the many existing generative models of viral propagation and their associated parameters (Bass 1969, Granovetter 1978, Watts 2002, Kempe et al. 2003, Dodds and Watts 2004). To clarify, generative models attempt to describe the underlying diffusion mechanism itself for example, as a function of the intrinsic infectiousness of the object that is spreading, or of the properties of the contact process or the network over which the diffusion occurs, or of the timescales associated with adoption. By contrast, our notion of structural virality is concerned exclusively with characterizing the structure of the observable adoption patterns that arise from some unobserved generative process. Naturally, the particular value of structural virality associated with some event will in general depend on the underlying generative process as indeed we will demonstrate in Section 5 where we introduce and study several such models. Importantly, however, our desired definition of structural virality should not depend on these particulars. Regardless of what contagion process is (assumed to be) responsible for some piece of content spreading, in other words, or what network it is spreading over, the end result is some pattern of adoptions that exhibits some structure, and our goal is to characterize a particular property of that structure. Recalling also that our goal is to disambiguate between the broadcast and multigenerational branching schematics depicted in Fig. 1, we first lay out some intuitively reasonably criteria that we would like any such metric to exhibit. First, for a fixed total number of adoptions in a cascade, structural virality should increase with the branching factor of the structure: specifically, it should be minimized for the broadcast structure on the left of Fig. 1 and should be relatively large for structures with high branching factor, as on the right of Fig. 1. Second, for a fixed branching factor, structural virality should increase with the number of generations (i.e. depth) of the cascade; all else equal, that is, larger branching structures should be more structurally viral than smaller ones. Finally, and in contrast with multi-generational branching structures, larger broadcasts should not be any more structurally viral than smaller broadcasts, hence we require that for the extreme case of a pure broadcast, structural virality be approximately independent of size. A natural choice for such a metric is simply the number of generations, or depth, of the cascade. Indeed, after size, depth is one of the most widely reported summary statistics of diffusion cascades (Liben-Nowell and Kleinberg 2008, Goel et al. 2012, Dow et al. 2013). One problem with

6 6 Goel et al.: The structural virality of online diffusion depth, however, is that a single, long chain can dramatically affect the measure. For example, a large broadcast with just one, long, multigenerational branch has large depth, even though we would not intuitively consider it to be structurally viral. To correct for this issue, one could instead consider the average depth of nodes (i.e., the average distance of nodes from the root). This average depth measure alleviates the problem of a handful of non-representative nodes skewing the metric, and intuitively distinguishes between broadcasts and multigenerational chains. Even this measure, however, fails in certain cases. Notably, if an idea or product traverses a long path from the root and then is broadcast out to a large group of adopters, the corresponding cascade would have high average depth (since most adopters are far from the root) even though most adoptions in this case are the result of a single influential node. Addressing the shortcomings of both depth and average depth, we focus our attention on a classical graph property studied originally in mathematical chemistry (Wiener 1947), where it is known as the Wiener index. Specifically, we define structural virality ν(t ) as the average distance between all pairs of nodes in a diffusion tree T ; that is, for n > 1 nodes, 1 n n ν(t ) = d ij (1) n(n 1) i=1 j=1 where d ij denotes the length of the shortest path between nodes i and j. 2 Equivalently, ν(t ) is the average depth of nodes, averaged over all nodes in turn acting as a root. Our metric ν(t ) provides a continuous measure of structural virality, with higher values indicating that adopters are, on average, farther apart in the cascade and thus suggesting an intuitively viral diffusion event. In particular, as with depth and average depth, over the set of all trees on n nodes, ν(t ) is minimized on the star graph (i.e., the stylized broadcast model in Fig. 1), where ν(t ) 2. Moreover, a complete k-ary tree (as in Fig 1 with k = 2) has structural virality approximately proportional to its height, hence structural virality will be maximized for structures that are large and that become that way through many small branching events over many generations. 3 Although ν(t ) satisfies some basic requirements of theoretical plausibility, as with the other candidate measures we discussed, it is possible to construct hypothetical examples for which the corresponding numerical values are at odds with the motivating intuition. For example, a graph comprised of two stars connected by a single, long path has large ν(t ) but would not intuitively be considered viral. Whether or not such pathological cases appear with any meaningful frequency is, however, largely an empirical matter, and hence the utility of the metric must ultimately be evaluated in the context of real examples, which we discuss in detail below, as well as in Appendix B. 2 Naive computation of ν(t ) requires O(n 2 ) time; however, as discussed in Appendix B, a more sophisticated approach yields a linear-time algorithm (Mohar and Pisanski 1988), facilitating computation on very large cascades. 3 Somewhat more precisely, for any branching ratio k << n, ν(t ) increases with size n, while for k n (i.e. pure broadcasts) it does not, hence increasing popularity corresponds to increasing structural virality only when it arises from viral spreading, not merely from larger broadcasts.

7 Goel et al.: The structural virality of online diffusion 7 3. Data and Methods Our primary analysis is based on approximately one billion diffusion events on Twitter, where an event constitutes the independent introduction of a piece of content into the social network including videos, images, news stories, and petitions along with all subsequent repostings of the same item. 4. Specifically, we include in our data all tweets posted on Twitter that contained URLs pointing to one of several popular websites over a 12 month period, from July 2011 to June In total, we observe roughly 622 million unique pieces of content; however, because individual pieces of content can be posted by multiple users, we observe approximately 1.2 billion adoptions (i.e., posting of content). Although our data is not a total sample of web content that is shared on Twitter 6, it does include the vast majority and hence is essentially unbiased at least with respect to Tweets linking to web content. 7 Importantly for our conclusions, our sample also exhibits considerable diversity both with respect to production and consumption. For example, a typical online video is likely to have been produced and distributed by an amateur videographer uploading his or her own work onto YouTube, whereas an article appearing in a major news outlet was likely written by a professional reporter. Moreover, the experience of watching a video is quite distinct from that of reading a news article, both in terms of the time and effort required on the part of the consumer and also their goals for example to be entertained versus informed in doing so. Due in part to these qualitative differences on both the supply and also demand sides of the market for media, we find large quantitative differences in the frequency of the four domains; specifically, images and videos are far more numerous than news stories, and petitions are by far the least numerous. For similar reasons, therefore, one might also expect qualitatively distinct sharing mechanisms to dominate in different domains, leading to different patterns both of popularity and also structural virality. 4 We use the term reposting rather than the more conventional retweet because individuals frequently repost content that they receive from another user without using the explicit retweet functionality provided by Twitter, or even acknowledging the source of the content. 5 For news: bbc.co.uk, cnn.com, forbes.com, nytimes.com, online.wsj.com, guardian.co.uk, huffingtonpost.com, news.yahoo.com, usatoday.com, telegraph.co.uk, msnbc.msn.com. For video: youtube.com, m.youtube.com, youtu.be, vimeo.com, livestream.com, twitcam.livestream.com, ustream.tv, twitvid.com, mtv.com, vh1.com. For images: twitpic.com, instagr.am, instagram.com, yfrog.com, p.twimg.com, twimg.com, i.imgur.com, imgur.com, img.ly, flickr.com. For petitions: change.org, twitition.com, kickstarter.com. 6 URLs and redirects were dereferenced from original tweets, and extraneous query parameters were removed from URLs to identify multiple versions of identical content. To avoid left-censoring of our data (i.e., missing the initial postings of a URL), we look for occurrences of the URLs during the month prior to our analysis period, and only include in our sample instances where the first observation does not appear before July 1, To avoid rightcensoring, we restrict to tweets introduced prior to June 30, 2012, but continue tracing the diffusion of these tweets through July 31, It is of course possible that Tweets containing links to web content are systematically different from other Tweets in ways that might affect our conclusions. For this reason, in Appendix D we conduct a separate analysis of tweets containing long hashtags, which are unlikely to diffuse outside of Twitter, finding qualitatively similar results.

8 8 Goel et al.: The structural virality of online diffusion 10% 1% 0.1% CCDF 0.01% 0.001% % % ,000 10,000 Cascade Size Figure 2 Distribution of cascade sizes on a log-log scale, aggregated across the four domains we study: videos, news, pictures, and petitions. For each independent introduction of a unique piece of content in our data we construct a corresponding diffusion tree that traces each adoption back to a single root node, namely the user who introduced that particular piece of content. 8 Specifically, for each observation of a URL whose diffusion we seek to trace, we record: (1) the adopter (i.e., the identity of the user who posted the content); (2) the adoption time (i.e., the time at which the content was posted); and (3) the identities of all users the adopter follows hereafter referred to as the adopter s friends from whom the adopter could conceivably have learned about the content. For each such event, we first determine if at least one of the adopter s friends adopted the same piece of content previously. If no such friend exists, then the adopter is labeled a root of the resulting diffusion tree; otherwise, the friend who adopted the content most recently before the focal adopter and who is most likely to have exposed the focal user to the content is labeled the focal adopter s parent. Although there is at times genuine ambiguity in determining the proximate cause of an adoption, in many cases adopters explicitly attribute another individual in their tweet, allowing us to accurately infer an adopter s parent in approximately 95% of instances (see Appendix C for details of the tree construction algorithm and the associated evaluation procedure). 4. Results Consistent with previous work (Bakshy et al. 2011, Goel et al. 2012), we find that the average size of these diffusion trees (also referred to interchangeably as cascades or diffusion events ) is 1.3 meaning that for every ten introductions of content, there are on average three additional downstream adoptions. More strikingly, and as noted in Goel et al. (2012), we also find that the vast 8 Although diffusion trees are in reality dynamic objects, meaning that they grow over time as new adoptions take place, here we treat them as static objects representing the final state of a given diffusion process.

9 Goel et al.: The structural virality of online diffusion 9 majority of cascades terminate within a single generation; specifically, about 99% of adoptions are accounted for either by the root nodes themselves or by the immediate followers of root nodes. As noted previously (Goel et al. 2012), however, the preponderance of small and shallow events does not rule out the possibility that large, structurally interesting events do occur, only that they occur sufficiently infrequently so as not to be observed even in relatively large datasets. Exploiting the fact that we have a much larger dataset than in previous studies over a billion observations in our initial sample we therefore now focus exclusively on the subsample of rare events that qualify as large, and hence have the potential to be structurally interesting. Specifically, hereafter we restrict attention to the 0.025% of diffusion trees containing at least 100 nodes (Fig. 2), a requirement that leaves us with roughly 1 out of every 4,000 cascades, and thus reduces the number of cascades we study in detail from approximately 1 billion to 219, Diversity of Structural Virality From this sub-population of successful diffusion events, Figure 3 displays a stratified random sample ordered by structural virality ν(t ). Specifically, cascades with between 100 and 1000 adopters were ranked by ν(t ) and logarithmically binned, and a random cascade was then drawn from each bin 9. We observe that the ordering from left to right and top to bottom by increasing ν(t ) is strikingly consistent with how these same structures would be ranked intuitively in order of increasing virality, not only in the trivial case of disambiguating broadcast and viral extremes, but also in making relatively fine-grained distinctions between intermediate cases. Thus, ν(t ) not only seems to be a reasonable measure of structural virality in theory, but also performs well in practice. Considering now the cumulative adoption curves shown below each cascade in Fig. 3, we make two further observations. First, while the shape of these adoption curves varies considerable, from events that experience a phase of rapid growth before leveling off to events that grow almost linearly over time, there is no consistent relationship with structural virality. Strikingly, in fact, the least structurally viral of all our sampled events (top left) exhibits a cumulative adoption curve that is almost indistinguishable in shape from the most structurally viral (bottom right). Second, the timescales on which the adoptions take place (noted in hours on the horizontal axis of the cumulative plots) also varies widely, from less than an hour (bottom left) to three days (top left). As with the shape of the curves, however, there is no consistent relationship between the timescale (speed) of an adoption process and its associated structural virality. We conclude that our measure of structural virality not only effectively quantifies differences in the underlying cascade structures, but is clearly doing so by using features of the diffusion that are not captured by aggregated data. 9 We note that this exercise was performed only once to avoid hand selection of the best random sample.

10 10 Goel et al.: The structural virality of online diffusion The ordering also highlights our first main empirical finding: Although the structures in Fig. 3 are all of similar size (i.e., have similar aggregate numbers of adopters), they exhibit remarkable diversity in structure, from an approximately pure broadcast (ν(t ) 2, top left) to an idealtype branching structure (ν(t ) = 34, bottom right), with numerous intermediate variations in between. The classical literature on diffusion often posits a critical threshold or tipping point for virality, suggesting a sharp break between cascades that are viral and those that are not. If the tipping point intuition is correct, one would expect that relatively large diffusion events such as those captured in the n = 100 (roughly one event in 4, 000) to n = 1, 000 (one in 100,000) range would be dominated either by broadcasts, on the one hand, or by viral spreading, on the other hand, but that combinations of the two should not arise. More generally, one might expect only a handful of canonical forms to account for the majority of large events: for example, some events spread exclusively via broadcast, while others spread exclusively via word-of-mouth, and others still spread by some combination of the two. Whatever one s intuitive mental model of diffusion, that is, one would likely expect to find that successful diffusion events of a given size would be typified by some combination of broad and viral diffusion, or at least some small taxonomy of types. It is striking, therefore, that Fig. 3 shows examples of fine-grained variations in structural virality across the entire range of possibilities Examining Popularity and Structural Virality Although Fig. 3 shows that one can find examples of cascades across the spectrum of structural virality, it says little about their relative frequency or how that varies by domain. To address these questions, Fig. 4A shows the size distribution of cascades larger than 100 adopters for all four domains news, videos, images, and petitions while Fig. 4B shows the corresponding distributions of structural virality. As anticipated, Fig. 4A shows that cascades can grow very large: For images and videos, the largest cascades attract several tens of thousands of reposts, while the most popular news stories are somewhat smaller (roughly 10,000 reposts), and petitions smaller still (several thousand reposts). In other words, while the vast majority of cascades are indeed small, large cascades do occur, albeit with low frequencies. Moreover, the size distributions appear to cluster into two categories: one comprising images and videos, and the other comprising the rather less popular categories of petitions and news stories. The most popular videos and images are more popular than the most popular news stories and petitions, in other words, not only because there are many more of the former but also because the corresponding distributions exhibit a shallower slope; that is, for any given percentile of the relevant population, videos and images are more popular than petitions and news stories. Although we lack a compelling explanation for this systematic difference, we note that the vast majority of the most popular Twitter accounts belong not to

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